A thing happened last week, as things so often do. Gurinder Chadha, the award-winning director of the film Bend It Like Beckham, gave an interview, in which she expressed grave misgivings about the current climate for children's movies. “Films like Shrek and all the Pixar stuff [The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc, Ratatouille, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E] ... are designed to suit everybody. They ... lose the sense of wonderment. Because, for adults, the gags have to be knowing. Children kind of get them, because they live in this celebrity world - but there is a lost sense of innocence.”

Chadha's plea for childhood innocence was somewhat ruined by the fact that at the time she was promoting her latest film, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. In terms of context, it's a slight, yet palpable, tactical mis-hit - a bit like Marlon Brando talking about chastity and lactose intolerance while on a promotional campaign for Last Tango in Paris.

Be that as it may, Chadha has a point. And not just about film, but right across children's literature and TV shows. Having spent much of the past seven years engaging in children's entertainment - listlessly and resentfully, I must admit - I have fomented a growing vexation against nearly all of it. First, as Chadha points out, there is a presumption that at least 80 per cent of all characters must be wisecracking cynics. Aliens, puppies, unicorns; ring-quests, time-travel, picnics - no matter what's happening, or whom it's happening to, everyone sounds like Chandler Bing, back-chatting Joey in Central Perk.

It's all so ... caffeinated, so ... smirky. Watching Chicken Little at the cinema, I realised that, in the current climate, no character can simply say something, in a low-key manner, to convey information or sentiment. It's quite bizarre to see an animated mouse talking like Noel Gallagher at an aftershow, after two lines of coke.

Of course, as someone who was raised on Daffy Duck - the original Chandler Bing - I am not eschewing the wisecrack. Indeed, I spend most of my time trying to make as many wisecracks as possible. My default position is standing in the kitchen, holding on to the back of a chair, saying: “Sienna Miller? See Any Fella, more like. No no, hang on - I can do better than that! Erm, erm ....” That's why I don't think children should be doing it; I know how exhausting it is. Kids need to be working on empathy, hand-eye co-ordination and bone-growing. Suddenly diverting all their limited resources from that into being Steve Martin is as ludicrous as Malta trying to join the space race.

And it so rarely goes well. Let's face it: kids aren't, by and large, terribly witty. They have written very few Broadway comedies or effervescently observational novellas. Kids can make you laugh, but usually by falling over, or referring to “Blimes Man's Buff”. Intentional humour is a much trickier feat. Which is unfortunate, as there is very little much more chafing to the nerves than a botched drive-by sassing from an eight-year-old. “Would you like some broccoli?” you might ask a visiting child at the dinner table. “Do I look like I want broccoli?” the child will say, practically eyeing the camera and sighing: “Sheesh. This dame.”

From a survival point of view, wisecracking is a risky undertaking for children, because when they fail at it they're as close as they're ever likely to come to being locked in the Bad Cupboard and left there for the rest of their lives. In short, being a wise-arse should - like sexual intercourse, cocktails and drag-car racing - be left to adults. It's not useful in a child, real or fictional.

While we're at it, fictional children also could do without being unfailingly clever, determined, technologically savvy alpha-beings dressed head-to-toe in freshly laundered Gap. What kind of depressing, dispiriting role model is that for real kids? If there's one time in your life when you should be expected to be nothing other than an ill-coordinated, ignorant heffalump, it's when you're a child. At that age it's your right to be covering nearly every conversational eventuality with three lines: “I don't get it”; “I didn't do it.Other boys did”; and “I want to go bathroom.”

The recently remade Famous Five is a case in point. In the original, the Five were essentially quite normal, dull kids, saying very little and getting excited about eating a hard-boiled egg. In the new animated version, they're extremely clued-up techno wizards with incredible hair and immense “chemistry”, who are practically having sex with each other and driving yachts. And as with all fictional children, they're dementedly super-close friends, risking their lives for each other every day. God, I find that offensive - that universal “your friends are the most precious thing of all” catechism. As a child who remained resolutely friendless until the age of 10, books and musicals were far more vital to me than “friends”.

Thankfully, when I was a kid - in the 1980s - everyone understood the concept of the socially rejected, nerdy, possibly borderline-smelly child. There were dozens of us in films and books. My kind were well-represented, if not well-regarded. These days, however, any fictional kid who started off friendless and nerdy would have to go on a “journey”, “look within himself” and end the story high-fiving a couple of new friends while wearing a baseball cap and shouting “WildCats for ever!” during a sunset. No child is allowed to remain lonely, confused,unresolved, depressed or just a bit dim and dull any more; it's considered unconscionable.

If I had one more cup of coffee, I'd probably start hypothesising that children who see only confident, sassy movie kids - who always win and are never contradicted - might end up being a generation who literally don't know how to lose an argument, and would rather stab an opponent than back down. Luckily, I'm not a 12-year-old in a 21st-century movie, so I can acknowledge that, all things considered, I'm still pretty stupid, don't really know much about developmental psychology and should just shut up and go play in the garden.
caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk

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